What We Talk About When We Talk About Soiling Ourselves

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And preorder Drew’s next book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about jelly, reincarnation, dad TV, minivans, Tom Thibodeau, and more.

Your letters:

Ben:

There are no options, Ben. When you soil yourself, you shit your pants. When you piss yourself, you say you’ve pissed yourself. When you puke all over yourself, you say you’ve puked all over yourself. Neither of those latter two scenarios represents a proper soiling of the britches. If I told you I soiled myself after a car accident, do you REALLY think I meant that I took a little tinkle down there? When a police report notes that a fleeing suspect soiled his undergarments, do you REALLY think he just unzipped his fly and unloaded his hangover into his pants? No. You think poop. You should always think poop.

Because what is soil? It’s dark. It’s dirty. It’s soft. It redeems itself only after it has participated in the arduous process of helping something grow. You know what else shares those characteristics, Ben? YOUR MONSTER DUMPS. You’re in big leagues of clothing defilement when you shit all over yourself. If my son came to me and told me, “I soiled myself,” then displayed a little piss stain on his undies, I would sentence him to three weeks’ worth of castor oil dinners for his crimes against proper usage. THEN he’d discover what a legit soiling looks like.

I’m sorry for such a curt answer, Ben. I just take defecation very seriously. This is a science website.

Ryan:

My friend, I do believe that’s an observation for Friend Of The Blog Dan Le Batard, who cornered the “this guy look like” market the same way we cornered the “remembering people” market. No one else is allowed to do either of those things. That’s hard law.

But if Defector Media purchased Meadowlark Media and all its standing trademark applications, I could freely tell you that Tom Thibodeau looks like a shitty public defender. I can already see myself being arrested, getting assigned Thibs as my council, and trusting him for a solid two weeks before I realize that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. I still fall for bureaucrats of that ilk, and quite often. It’s not fun.

Brad:

Pony up for that swag then, Brad, because I’m about to answer your shit thoroughly. First of all, if you have two kids, you don’t need a minivan. We drove a CRV when we had only two kids and it did the job. It was when my wife got pregnant a third time that we were like OH FUCK WE NEED A VAN. With three kids, you only have a couple of options if you want enough space in the back to make sure the kids don’t murder each other: a minivan, or a Karen car like a Suburban, Yukon, or Tahoe. We test drove a Tahoe last month, along with a Toyota Sequoia. Both of these cars cost over $70,000 and they fucking SUCKED. The bus I took to school when I was nine had a smoother ride than those two monstrosities. Americans have awful taste in cars.

I digress. You can afford a much more compact, affordable SUV if you’d prefer that over a minivan. But if you have restless sperm and plan to expand the family head count, then you can get a van without shame. We got a brand new Odyssey because it was significantly cheaper than the new Sienna, plus the Sienna had a super high-up bridge console in the front row that my wife despised. The Sienna BEFORE the latest redesign (we owned a 2011 Sienna before trading it in) doesn’t have that console, so you can buy a used one of those if you want. That way you’ll save money and you won’t hesitate to treat your new old van like shit.

The other thing I learned while car shopping this spring is that trim level is everything. I always thought the base model of a car was the same car as the fancier trim, only without leather seats etc. I was wrong. They’re totally fucking different. The base models ride worse. They operate worse. They only common trait they share with the Executive Class model is the silhouette. Otherwise, it’s the difference between staying at a Travelodge and staying at an actual hotel. My new Odyssey has a bidet in both the driver AND passenger side seats, and I can never go back now. It’s night and day from the base model that peasants drive to and fro.

Chris:

The latter. I never got to ride shotgun in college because some asshole would always call “SHOTGUN!” before the quarter barrel was even kicked. But so long as I had window access, I was all good. I could stare at the side of the road. I could also roll the window down to barf! You can’t beat that. No one wants the bitch seat, unless they’re riding in a luxurious Honda Odyssey.

Steve:

No but you’re setting yourself up to become one. There is already a coterie of politicians and candidates whose only stated goal, whose only JOY, comes from triggering the liberals. Philip Bump of the Washington Post dubbed these people “zero-issue candidates,” and they borrow heavily from Trump in that they don’t really give a shit about anything except being miserable to people they don’t like.

It’s only logical that there would be some burgeoning liberal equivalent to this, similar to the Krassensteins or any other online thirst relic. But those people ALSO blow. They blow less than, like, Marjorie Taylor Greene, but they aren’t particularly useful. You don’t want, like, Debra Messing holding office, and you certainly don’t want to run Montclair as if she actually was. The best Democratic politicians right now are the ones that are able to consistently bury their enemies using actual facts and actual logic, with Katie Porter being the prime example. Katie Porter isn’t making Big Pharma squirm just to get her rocks off, although she’s absolutely entitled to. She’s shaming them openly with proof of their misdeeds, and getting their non-answers in the Congressional record and on TV for public awareness. There’s a purpose behind her ownage.

You said, “I honestly want to make my town better and I think I have good ideas on how to make it happen,” but if you’re really just coveting the potential theater of it, that’s gonna eclipse everything and then you won’t be worth a crap. This is one of the reasons I quit political writing. I used to get pissed at something Trump did, or something Democrats didn’t do. Then I would bang out a post cursing them all to hell, watch it go up, and feel better for exactly three seconds before realizing that I hadn’t done anything productive. And that was just writing about politics. If you run for office with the quiet ambition—and no one even needs to be quiet about it anymore—that you’re gonna serve as Catharsis Patrol for all the good guys, you will end up sucking. It’s a lock. Just build a park with a clean bathroom. That alone would already make you the Lincoln of Jersey.

While I’m on this, I’ve said nothing but nice things about Old Man Biden since he passed that big-ass stimulus bill and got the vaccines out ahead of schedule. But my admiration is wearing thin. Every story now has become, “The House just passed a bill that’s guaranteed to end cancer in America forever, but it faces a steep climb in the Senate!” I swear to god, if the old man doesn’t put the goddamn Senate in the woodchipper, I might just run for a council seat in Aberdeen.

Tim:

Just buy it and chill. It’s not on you to end BIG MEAT’s horrifying animal and labor practices. It’s just like how individuals can’t be expected to end global warming when—say it with me—100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of the world’s greenhouse emissions. You remember that little chestnut, yeah? It’s useful shorthand when you want to make the point that companies like Tyson or whoever would LOVE to make doing the right thing everyone else’s responsibility and not theirs. That’s how they GITCHA. So go ahead and buy the frozen nuggets and tenders (as I have for the past decade), and then offset your guilt by voting against their interests, and by donating to the ACLU, the Humane Society, or other powerhouse nonprofits that have the juice and the capital to make BIG MEAT’s life more difficult.

Also, I think that American eating habits may organically (no pun intended) evolve to the point where a manufacturer like Tyson ends up shit out of luck. Ten years ago, if you had told me that every fast food joint would have a meatless burger on the menu and that those burgers would be VERY popular, I would’ve laughed you out of the fucking room. But that’s exactly what’s happened. Two of my three kids don’t like meat, and they’re hardly alone. Last year, one in four Americans said they were eating less meat. Eleven Madison Park just went fully vegan across its entire menu. Every media outlet wants to make cicadas and eat them for a stunt. In another 10 years, the most popular food on earth could be squash blossoms or some other crazy shit, and then Frank Perdue will be good and fucked. Don’t rule it out.

HALFTIME!

Alexander:

Are you saying it’s NOT peanut butter jelly time? Not with a baseball bat? Not with a football cap? Now where you at, Alexander? Where you at? Where you at? Where you at?

[Alexander makes peanut butter and jelly ribs]

Now there you go. There you go. There you go. There you go.

In all seriousness, you can donate the jelly. Or you can make 5,000 PB&J sandwiches and give them to needy schoolkids. Someone out there could use that jelly much more than you, and has better ideas for how to deploy it. And then you can just lie to Nana and say you ate it all and it was the BEST jelly you’ve ever had. But there’s no need to spend precious man-hours trying to turn that shit into some kind of luxe comfort food marinade.

Nick:

When I think of Dad Television, I think of every CBS drama, every show on the History Channel, and every reality show on Discovery Channel. Those channels are dad content mills, and they know that to keep the white male 45+ demo happy, they have to include at least one of the following core elements across all of their programming:

• Former movie star now slumming it on TV as a humorless cop
• Mike Rowe
• Interview with a former CIA agent who can make a wildly stupid conspiracy theory sound downright plausible
• Hitler
• Horribly staged re-enactments of significant world events
• Surly blue collar workers who are the only people who GET what it’s like to work an oil rig off the coast of Greenland

This is where I note that Aerial America contains none of those core elements, because it’s the greatest show on television. And if you think it’s an old man show, well I’ll have you know that it’s my 12-year-old’s favorite TV show as well. This is largely because I let him watch it during otherwise screen-free hours because I find it educational, and then the other two kids complain about how we’re watching Aerial America yet again. BUT FUCK THEM KIDS. All they do all day is watch Youtube videos of other people watching Youtube videos. THEY WOULDN’T KNOW GOOD TELEVISION IF IT BUSTED DOWN OUR DOOR AND COLLARED THEM FOR HEROIN SMUGGLING!

I need to be more shameless about my dad preferences. Sometimes I’ll get a Twitter reply, or even a comment down below here at Defector, where people will be like HEY CHECK OUT THE OLD GUY! YOU SURE ARE OLD, OLD GUY! And I’m like hey, asshole, what age would you LIKE me to be? Huh? I’m a 44-year-old dad in suburbs with hearing aids and brain damage. I earned my age. Do you WANT me to pretend I’m fucking 19? Do you want me to listen to “Brutal” by Olivia Rodrigo and NOT immediately think that someone took a Hole album and said, “Make this dumber”? Do you want me to be a fucking virulent Marvel fanboy? Get fucked. YOU spend the rest of your sorry life trying to cling to a youth that will abandon you 10 seconds from now. Me, I’ll be in my Odyssey, listening to old Wilco and chilling the fuck out. And then I’m gonna watch Aerial America while fisting a bag of Lay’s and I’ll be happy. THE PRESIDENT KNOWS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.

I should probably take all this ribbing like a man, shouldn’t I.

Ryan:

Oh, I’d get rid of the end zone fumble rule, which fucked the Browns four months ago and which no sane person thinks is worth a crap. Kansas City failson Clark Hunt said the Competition Committee would look at the rule this offseason. Guess what? They didn’t. Here’s Committee Chair Rich McKay, who simply adores the rule as is:

“I don’t even know that we discussed it this year.”

In fact, McKay went on to echo the same argument that six tape eaters made to defend the rule back in January. DURRRR IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE RULE DON’T FUMBLE THE BAW NEAR THE END ZONE DURRRR. Fuck all that. I could change that rule with a snap of my fingers and absolutely no one outside of that harem of rule fetishists would care. I’d be changing football for the better now and forever. There’s no unforeseen monkey's-paw side effect for me to worry about…

[The Vikings immediately lose to the Packers when Aaron Jones fumbles the ball out of the end zone at the one and then Green Bay gets a do-over]

Shit.

Ian:

I might have some questions for LeBron James Jr. of Fairbanks, but it IS allowed. Bronny James’s legal name is just LeBron James, and not LeBron James Jr. Suffixes like “Junior” and “III” and “The Great” aren’t automatically listed on the birth certificate. So technically yes, Carl James could name his son LeBron and tack an official “Junior” onto it and not be arrested. I don’t think it would make Other Bronny’s childhood a happy one, but hey, at least ONE LeBron James in this world would finally get vaccinated. HEYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Lawrence:

There isn’t. My roommate in college, Kevin, was a hugeass indie music fan and I used to go through his CD stack and gawk at all the weirdly named bands he listened to, with Archers of Loaf being the prime example. Just the absolute shittiest band name. And yet, I gave the original AOL a shot anyway and was rewarded with powerful riffage. You gotta keep an open mind because band/artist names have always been stupid, especially now with every artist giving themselves an SEO-optimized handle that sounds like a fucking email account password. If Pupp2Still makes good music despite being named that, it’s on me to find out. It’s not like I need much time to divine it in 2021. I pull them up on Spotify, listen for 30 seconds, and then never listen to them again. Easy.

Will:

I’d wanna know, sure. I wouldn’t get all Marianne Williamson about it, but I’d enjoy knowing that I was a new and improved incarnation of, say, Joseph Stalin. It wouldn’t phase me, it would just make a good icebreaker at cocktail parties.

Email of the week!

Asherdan:

As I do now.